Creative Page Editor's Review

Creative Page is a program that allows you to create your own HTML Web pages.

Since this is a program that is under a shareware license, I hoped it is something at least acceptable. The first thing that I did, was to set the initial parameters of the Web page and I hoped to find something like a WYSIWYG editor in order to be a Web designing not a Web coding application.

This program can do the same stuff a free text editor can do if you know some HTML coding. In fact in order to use this program you do have to know some HTML.

In order to add HTML tags you have to look for them into the menus. There's nothing in the application's interface that looks like a shortcut for these kind of things, not even the minimal formatting buttons. What can I say, the interface is not very inspired.

Knowing the fact that I am testing a commercial application, I tried to find something good. I found the built in FTP client and I thought at least this module is a good implementation. It is not.

I managed to connect to my own FTP host and upload something but it didn't work. That's not all. It didn't return the list of my folders and files so I couldn't download anything. Even a Firefox extension, FireFTP, can do the FTP client job way much better. I tested my host with FireFTP right after closing the Creative Page's FTP client and it worked flawlessly, so the host was OK.

Pluses: I am still looking for pluses. Maybe the fact that you won't have to type the basic HTML tags and all you have to do is to search for them in the menus. It has a optimize/deoptimize option and maybe this is the only difference between this editor and a full featured and nice text editor such as jEdit or Smultron. A good thing is the 'Crash Protection' engine, but this isn't a tool that can be found exclusive in this program.

Drawbacks / flaws: the interface is very poor, the only remarkable thing is the lack of quick access buttons, working with the menus isn't the happiest option and maybe there should be implemented a contextual menu. The built in FTP client is there but this won't help you if it keep refuses to upload/download something, anything.

In conclusion: I think the "just 29.95$" price is a bad joke from the producer's side and I didn't know if should or shouldn't I laugh my sox off. If you want to use something that has the freedom of Open Source, try Nvu. I might add: Nvu is free, better, and it can actually do Web design, not just basic Web coding, so you can actually work on your creative side.

version reviewed: 3.2.4